How a bank developed venture capital in Jamaica with AchieveIt
ABOUT DEVELOPMENT BANK OF JAMAICA
The DBJ is the only development finance institution in Jamaica and is committed to supporting local entrepreneurs in the productive sectors to spur economic growth. The Bank does not only support businesses through the provision of access to financing, technical assistance, and a partial guarantee program, but it also facilitates the development of an enabling ecosystem for private equity and venture capital. It also facilitates investment in publicly-owned entities by entrepreneurs while simultaneously allowing the Government fiscal space by giving up management and operations of companies that are more efficiently and profitably run by the private sector.
THE CHALLENGE
Candice Williams is the Strategy Manager within the Strategic Services Division. She’s responsible for developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating corporate strategies across all 10 divisions within the organization. After the development of the Bank’s corporate plan, Candice assists with the creation of operational plans for each division and assigns Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure progress.
Not only was the organization struggling with creating comprehensive, leadership-level reports on a monthly and quarterly basis, but it was also nearly impossible to see the impact of daily activities on organizational goals. Logging plan updates in Microsoft Access or Word was a back and forth process that flooded email inboxes and spanned weeks. Extracting the data and manually uploading it to an Excel dashboard often led to discrepancies in information with no process for quality control. Candice would then need to analyze all the metrics and recreate them again in a presentation format for the Board.
THE SOLUTION
It wasn’t until Candice joined us for a webinar that she saw the Development Bank of Jamaica wasn’t alone in the battle for better plan execution. AchieveIt’s strategy execution software and execution excellence team were able to solve the bank’s issues with dashboards and automatic reports, and also optimize their processes so they could spend more time focusing on strategy and less time generating reports.
The user-friendly platform was extremely important for quick adoption, as was the AchieveIt execution consulting team coming onsite to train and share best practices.
“Our Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Execution Consultant have been very accessible. They always respond in good time and help us refine our process to accomplish more of our goals.”
THE RESULTS
“The biggest improvement for us has been effective implementation and better decision-making regarding the status of our strategies. We’re finally using one single platform for all of our KPIs and operation plan tracking, and we don’t have to spend time manually reporting. Everyone has been able to use the platform very easily. We can provide updates easily and in a short time frame. It’s been a huge improvement.”
The Development Bank of Jamaica has since created many new plans, keeping all their KPIs in one central location instead of in disparate Excel spreadsheets. All their historical information is in one place, so they can analyze trends to plan for the future.
On a scale of effectiveness, our process went from 1 to 10. It is so much easier! Every strategic meeting we go into now is more efficient and informative and our reporting takes so much less time. We’re always looking for other opportunities to upload plans in AchieveIt and whenever we meet with our counterparts in other Government agencies we tell them they should be using it!
- Candice Williams
Strategy Manager
